


What will you do now?

by sliverofanonymity



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: F/M, M/M, Really really really slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-11-14 13:49:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11209353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sliverofanonymity/pseuds/sliverofanonymity
Summary: Moshae Sjefa wants her dear Akksul to heal, Scott is terrified for what he could do with his words.Someone completely removed from the situation steps in, and she doesn't listen to charming words, or believe for one second that Akksul even wants to heal.She confronts the formidable Evfra with Akksul, and that is step one in her plan.





	1. Chapter 1

Sara had dealt with a lot of neurodivergent people in her time, it came easily being neurodivergent herself. Though she did not find ease in putting herself in others shoes (she always took the meaning literally). She had the determination and compassion to bring someone out of their mental illness, and the understanding to help them cope with how they were feeling.

Which is why, as she was currently watching Akksul sloppily attack Evfra in the Resistance HQ training grounds, she had moved their sessions to the open space.

"Come _on_ you've got to defend yourself properly. You're wide open here!" Evfra barked, pointing out Akksul's weaknesses. Sara took note, and wondered if he'd been hiding his injuries again. 

 _Stubborn._ She noted how he looked uncomfortable, and to save Akksul the embarrassment of asking for help, she called off the training.

Evfra rolled his eyes, and left the training grounds. He hadn't even broken a sweat. Sara frowned at his back, though she found her eyes wandering. Why her brother thought to put her with two of the most intensely stubborn angaran men in the galaxy, she would never know. She shook her head to clear her thoughts, and found Akksul staring at her. 

 

It had been several weeks since she started this program with him, and almost a year since her brother had met him. He had made no progress with his feelings towards aliens, and had actually taken to hurting himself as if he were back in the kett camp that started it all.

He winced as she helped him up and took him over to a bench. 

"You did it again, didn't you?" She asked gently, pulling out some medi gel. Akksul growled, but let her pull his loose shirt up. His blue skin was mottled with bruises and scars. 

"How did you do  _that_?" She gasped as she opened the medigel and applied it generously to his bruised skin. She heard him gasp as her warm hands moved the cold gel over his abdomen. He lifted his shirt higher and she saw the bruising continued, then she peered around his torso and saw the mess of his back.

" _Akksul_." She hissed. "You should have told me  _before_ you were due to spar with Evfra!"

"You said you didn't want to hear a word of it." He replied, his voice strained from disuse. Gone was the charming convincing voice that built the Roekaar, and replacing it was the voice of a broken young man. 

"Yeah, about 6 weeks ago when you were trying to tell me how disgusting I was. I have my own voice telling me that all the time. I didn't need to hear _that_ coming from you as well." She said as she smoothed more of the gel on his bruises. He shivered, and she dismissed it as a reaction to the cold gel.

"It's not self inflicted." He muttered, his voice raspy. "And I  _deserved_ it."

Sara looked closer, and could see the fading bruises from older injuries. His back had been a mess from the start according to her brother, and Akksul's old friend Jaal. However there were new cuts and bruises whenever he walked the streets of Aya.

She pulled his shirt down, and lead him out of the Resistance buildings to her small apartment beneath Aya's museum. 

 

Akksul lived quite nearby, but she had a suspicion that he was being targeted when he was alone. Once inside her apartment, she closed her curtains and set up her security drones at the door and windows. 

"Who was it?" She asked, terrified they would attack him in her apartment.

Akksul laughed, a pathetic choking sound.

"I deserved it!" He bit out, flinching once more as Sara tended to his wounds, his shirt lay on the couch she'd pushed him into, her hands warming the medigel.

"Akksul." She warned him. It had been like this since she had decided to accept this job, away from the Nexus and anything that reminded her of her father. She rubbed medigel into his mottled blue skin, and sighed. "Is it pride?"

Akksul bit his lip, his pout prominent as he looked at her.

"Mothers ask me daily why their children aren't coming home. Why your brother didn't kill me." He said grufly. "Most days I wish he had."

Sara scoffed. "You need to own your past. You can't keep running from it like this! That is why he let you live." Her tone softened. "And because Jaal asked him so sweetly."

Akksul balked at that. 

"He loves you, you know. So does the Moshae." She continued. "You are a beautiful, intelligent scientist. Why let that go to waste when there's a whole load of discoveries to be made."

"You say that as if I am still that man..." he said darkly. "He died in a kett slave camp."

"No you didn't. You were  _broken_ there." Sara frowned at him. "And an alien has come to  _fix_ you."

Akksul growled. "That isn't even the worst of it!"

He stood from the couch. Eyeing the apartment.

"You've got me trapped in here, offering sweet words, while you have your technology pointed at my attackers who are  _innocent people_." He spread his arms. "I  _let_ them beat me. I  _let_ Evfra beat me. Because it is what I  _deserve_. It is what I have  _always_ deserved."

 

Sara stood, disabled her drones and opened her curtains. She couldn't tell at this point if she was manipulating him, or if he was manipulating her. He cast her a look and sat back down. 

She stood, feeling utterly shit. She had completely misread him, thinking he needed security. She went to her kitchenette and fetched two cups which she filled with water. She also brought over some snacks that Jaal and her brother had recommended she try. 

She set the dish and cups down on the table.

"I'm sorry..." she began, watching as Akksul rubbed medigel into his arm, applying it cold. "I thought you would feel safe if I did that..."

"Intensely panicked is how I actually felt." He murmured, pulling off his boots, one ankle was heavily bruised and swollen. "Yes, it's broken. Has been for three weeks now."

"Oh my god, Akksul!" She gasped, running back to her kitchenette to retrieve something from her freezer and her first aid box.

She knelt at his feet, gently taking the wounded leg into her lap. "Tell me if I hurt you?" She said, missing the expression on his face.

He grunted and took one of the cups from the table, taking intermittent sips as she worked on his ankle. She was rubbing the gel in so tenderly he gasped. Sara thought it was in pain. 

"I'll stop for now. I'm just going to bandage it up, and you are going to stay with me until it is healed." She then added. "If you'd like to. Or I can take you back to your apartment and look after you there."

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sara Ryder has never been one to notice subtle things. She is often lovingly called "subtle as a sledgehammer" by her brother. 
> 
> What is a subtle anyway? Sara will never know. She'll just pass it off as a quirk. 
> 
> Sara misses some obvious things in this chapter.

Akksul shivered as her hands touched him, barely suppressing a groan as she finished bandaging him up. 

It had been about 6 and a half weeks since they had met, and she still couldn't piece together why he was doing what he was doing.

He thought he had been obvious when he'd worn milky way origin clothing, the lose fitting shirt worn with the top buttons undone. She hadn't even  _glanced_ at it. Or him. 

She'd given  _Evfra_ a good long stare, but ignored  _him._  

He refused to speak to her, and just left her hanging without an answer. He would rot here, on her couch, and she wouldn't notice, he was sure of it.

"Here it is then... I guess..." she said, standing and taking her glass with her into the kitchenette.

 

His eyes trailed up and down her body. She was a soft woman, with ample fat deposits, her thighs had little dimples that he could  _just_ see through her leggings. Her belly jiggled whenever she would laugh. Which was never around him, and her face was vibrant and rounded, with full cheeks and a long sharp nose. 

Often, he wondered how their noses would feel, tenderly rubbing together between kisses.

He could feel himself blushing as she walked back in. 

"Nutrient paste with some bread sound okay for dinner? I have some soup as well?" She said, coming in and sitting next to him on the couch. 

He made an affirmative grunt. She looked at his face.

"You always look like you're crying..." she said suddenly, reaching to touch his face. 

 

He took her hand, but his bioelectricity flared and sent a shock through to her, she withdrew her hand immediately.

 

\-------

 

While Sara was recuperating from her coma, and her mental fight with the Archon, he had come to Meridian with the Moshae. 

The aliens had found out so much of the lost Angaran technology, and how they were created. He thought it was incredible.

He contacted Scott shortly afterwards, expressing his need to apologize, he'd fixed so much of what the kett had broken. Including himself.

Scott had laughed it off and said it was "all in a days work", but it had been months. Months of solid hard work and terraforming.

 

\----

 

 

Scott had shown him a photo of her without context, just to gauge his reaction during one of his "aliens are friends, except the kett, because fuck those guys" lessons. Stupidly, he'd asked Scott if he was showing him eligible women.

Scott's face had lit up like a beacon, he'd run out of the room and brought Jaal back with him. He asked about the woman in the photograph again, and Akksul had squirmed, his blush evident as he professed his attraction. 

The Archon was defeated, and Akksul was attracted to an alien. Jaal had said something like that, smiling that wide way he does when things go right.

"She's my sister." Scott had said. Akksul had paled then, thinking it was some sort of test. "She is stubborn, and as subtle as a sledgehammer. I think she has a thing for stubborn angaran men too."

"Ah, then she's bonded?" He'd asked, equal parts relieved and distraught.

"Haha, no! She's too preoccupied to notice when her interest is returned. Or if someone is interested in her..." Scott said.

Jaal chuckled. "I almost felt bad when she flat out refused a young man who had been working himself up for months to talk to her. He had given obvious human and angaran flirting cues, but she stopped him because she wasn't interested in what he had to say because it wasn't related to her interests."

Somehow he had got it into his head that he would make her find him interesting.

 

One of her interests was nursing. She had awoken from her coma, desperate to follow Dr. Carlyle around, and help out with patients. It had eventually worn him down, and he had sat her down with some medical books. She had then gone on to ask about the aliens.

Angaran... things were another of her interests. The first time he had encountered her before meeting her, she had been picking Avela's brain. Avela was absolutely ecstatic after Sara had seen her, that she went to work on some artifacts that had been puzzling her, and managed to solve one. She and Avela had become fast friends, talking science and history.

She was also fascinated by angaran medicine, and the treatments of mental illnesses and neurodiversity. Somehow convincing the medical staff to let her borrow tomes and reading them at the tavetaan.

In fact, he knew so much about her before he met her, that he thought he'd had her all mapped out, when she turned it all into a big mess.

First of all, she'd gotten him all wrong. He still needed a bit of therapy for his nightmares, but he was mostly PTSD free. 

He was also trying to work out the differences in his hatred towards the kett, and outright xenophobia. Scott had been helping, and he had met quite a few pleasant aliens. 

However he still had to deal with his roekaar involvement (being the leader). And how he messed up. 

Pain helped him remember how much pain he had put others through, and he sought it through the resistance. Evfra was more than happy to have him as a training dummy, and knocked him out a few times himself. 

However, Sara saw him as this broken boy, and it infuriated him at first, before he began to use it to his advantage. He got injured? He hid it until it was too much to bear, and the first time, she'd torn open his shirt. Her hands had been all over him, and he'd nearly passed out from overstimulation which he blamed on being touch starved.

 

Now she was staring at him  _like that_. Like she wanted to wrap him up and make all of his hurt go away, and he just  _tingled_. He took a sip of water, and a handful of the snacks, picking at them one at a time. 

He tucked his good leg underneath his injured one, and watched her pack away the contents of her first aid kit. She handed him something cold and brought the coffee table closer so he could rest his leg.

He made to move, but she gently lifted his leg, and propped it up with a rolled up towel, then arranged the frozen items around it.

She stroked his thigh.

"Are you okay? Can I get you anything?" She asked gently. 

He bit his lip, doubtful that she would do the lewd things he had been imagining her doing. Her hand stayed on his thigh. His heart pounded. 

"Don't touch me." He managed to choke out. She looked hurt, but removed her hand.

"Should I let you rest then?" She asked, moving to stand. But he did something stupid. He grabbed her hand. 

She flushed a deep crimson, and he pulled her back towards him. He was doing something incredibly stupid.

 

 


End file.
